Expertopinion, public opinion, and even the White House are increasingly split between two camps on how we should proceed in Afghanistan: The doves, represented in the White House by Vice President Biden, call for targeted counterterrorism and a scaled down presence; while the hawks, with whom President Obama seems to side, insist that only boots on the ground and a strong counterinsurgency can tame the Taliban and restore stability. Divisions between the two are contentious and a clear path for success remains elusive. But an unusual program in Saudi Arabia may offer a way for both to come together.

Saudi Arabia has a novel approach to terrorism: rehabilitation. The
program seeks to reform captured terrorists with religious re-education
and even art therapy. Once released, extensive government outreach may
purchase them a car or even arrange a wife. In short, the goal is to
reincorporate extremist militants into society. Officials say over a
thousand terrorists have been reformed. It stands to reason that Saudi
Arabia, one of the world's more oppressive regimes, would not be so
taken with the program unless it was effective.

The U.S. should apply a similar program in Afghanistan, perhaps jointly
with Saudi Arabia. It should appeal to both sides of America's
Afghanistan debate. A rehabilitation program would be part of a broad
and aggressive counterinsurgency strategy of curbing destabilizing
violence, but it would also be a step towards regional involvement from
Saudis and thus a reduced American presence further down the line. The
Washington Post reported Wednesday that Obama is considering sending
some Guantanamo detainees to the Saudi program. The White House must
see the merits of the program, then, and would be amenable to applying
it elsewhere. More importantly, with the U.S. and Saudi Arabia working
together on counterterrorism, a joint Afghanistan program wouldn't be
out of the question.

The Saudi program views terrorists as confused and angry young men. It
treats their extremism as a social disease bred by poverty, lack of
education and xenophobia. They are not, in other words, the comic-book
villains Westerners often perceive them to be. By reincorporating them
back into society with social programs and reeducation, Saudi Arabia
succeeds in curbing terrorism in the short term. In the long term, it
understands that jailing or killing a terrorist makes him a martyr,
whereas reforming and releasing him makes him a walking refutation to
the terrorist zeal. Al Qaeda uses killed compatriots as a recruiting
tool, but no one bombs a police station to avenge their cousin being
forced to finger-paint.

Saudi Arabia's program's greatest setback did not come until the
country's counterterrorism chief invited a terrorist, who claimed to
surrender but in fact carried a suicide bomb, into his home without
searching him. Clearly this was a mistake. But the fact that the Saudi
officials had to do something this obviously irresponsible for the
program to fail -- and, indeed, that they felt comfortable taking the
risk -- demonstrate just how successful this has been.

The program's success stands in stark contrast to the dubious track
record of our Abu Ghraib/Guantanamo counterterrorism, refuting the
long-held American treatment of terrorists as "evil-doers." It
highlights the difficulty of fighting a subtle social force in a vastly
foreign culture half a world away. Whereas we see Muslim terrorists as
alien and incomprehensible, the Saudi program treats them more
sympathetically, not unlike gang rehabilitation programs in major US
cities. Applying a similar program in Afghanistan and Pakistan would
not only ease terrorism but it would also address rising anti-American
sentiment among the rest of the populace.

American soldiers could set up rehabilitation centers to be run by
local officials. This would facilitate the deteriorating connections
between the government and citizenry. Captured terrorists and even
Taliban insurgents could be reformed and taught useful trades. After
all, many Afghans and Pakistanis join the Taliban because, with
unemployment at 40%, they have little other choice. Saudi
counterterrorist officials could help design or even oversee the
programs with Americans providing security, thus promoting Saudi
involvement without requiring them to commit troops. If the programs
are successful, they could eventually be handed over completely to
Saudi control.

In addition to promoting a long-term strategy of making Afghanistan a
regional and not an American problem, thus moving our exit further up
the horizon, it would ease the populist anti-Americanism bubbling up
there. It's true that Afghans, who are ethnically Pashtun and Tajik,
could be resentful of Arab involvement, but both Afghans and Saudis are
Sunni. Captured terrorists--or even insurgents--are going to find a
fellow Sunni much more sympathetic and persuasive than an American
interrogator.

No doubt many in America would object to terrorists being coddled by
social welfare programs, but they work. Surely buying a car for a
reformed terrorist would be less offensive than buying another casket
for an American soldier. With the war projected to cost $65 billion
this year, and Afghanistan's per capita GDP at $700, it would not take
much of our war budget to dramatically improve the lives of angry young
militants.

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The revolutionary ideals of Black Panther’s profound and complex villain have been twisted into a desire for hegemony.

The following article contains major spoilers.

Black Panther is a love letter to people of African descent all over the world. Its actors, its costume design, its music, and countless other facets of the film are drawn from all over the continent and its diaspora, in a science-fiction celebration of the imaginary country of Wakanda, a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored. It is the attempt to penetrate The Void that brought us Alex Haley’s Roots, that draws thousands of African Americans across the ocean to visit West Africa every year, that left me crumpled on the rocks outside the Door of No Return at Gorée Island’s slave house as I stared out over a horizon that my ancestors might have traversed once and forever. Because all they have was lost to The Void, I can never know who they were, and neither can anyone else.

In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold.

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms. Student survivors of the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to their state Capitol to attend a rally, meet with legislators, and urge them to do anything they can to make their lives safer. These teenagers are speaking clearly for themselves on social media, speaking loudly to the media, and they are speaking straight to those in power—challenging lawmakers to end the bloodshed with their “#NeverAgain” movement.

Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein flew to Seattle for a press conference at which he announced little, but may have said a great deal.

Back in the fall of 2001, exactly one month after the 9/11 attacks, a lawyer in Seattle named Tom Wales was murdered as he worked alone at his home computer at night. Someone walked into the yard of Wales’s house in the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood of Seattle, careful to avoid sensors that would have set off flood lights in the yard, and fired several times through a basement window, hitting Wales as he sat at his desk. Wales survived long enough to make a call to 911 and died soon afterwards. He was 49, divorced, with two children in their 20s.

The crime was huge and dismaying news in Seattle, where Wales was a prominent, respected, and widely liked figure. As a young lawyer in the early 1980s he had left a potentially lucrative path with a New York law firm to come to Seattle and work as an assistant U.S. attorney, or federal prosecutor. That role, which he was still performing at the time of his death, mainly involved prosecuting fraud cases. In his off-duty hours, Wales had become a prominent gun-control advocate. From the time of his death onward, the circumstances of the killing—deliberate, planned, nothing like a robbery or a random tragedy—and the prominence of his official crime-fighting record and unofficial advocacy role led to widespread assumption that his death was a retaliatory “hit.” The Justice Department considers him the first and only U.S. prosecutor to have been killed in the line of duty.

Here are some readers with extra elements on this discussion—political, cultural, international. First, an American reader on the interaction of current concepts of masculinity and the nearly all-male population of mass gun murderers:

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a “safe haven” law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family—nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

The path to its revival lies in self-sacrifice, and in placing collective interests ahead of the narrowly personal.

The death of liberalism constitutes the publishing world’s biggest mass funeral since the death of God half a century ago. Some authors, like conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, of Why Liberalism Failed, have come to bury yesterday’s dogma. Others, like Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism), Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal), and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) come rather to praise. I’m in the latter group; the title-in-my-head of the book I’m now writing is What Was Liberalism.

But perhaps, like God, liberalism has been buried prematurely. Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.

A new study explores a strange paradox: In countries that empower women, they are less likely to choose math and science professions.

Though their numbers are growing, only 27 percent of all students taking the AP Computer Science exam in the United States are female. The gender gap only grows worse from there: Just 18 percent of American computer-science college degrees go to women. This is in the United States, where many college men proudly describe themselves as “male feminists” and girls are taught they can be anything they want to be.

Meanwhile, in Algeria, 41 percent of college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math—or “STEM,” as it’s known—are female. There, employment discrimination against women is rife and women are often pressured to make amends with their abusive husbands.

According to a report I covered a few years ago, Jordan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates were the only three countries in which boys are significantly less likely to feel comfortable working on math problems than girls are. In all of the other nations surveyed, girls were more likely to say they feel “helpless while performing a math problem.”

A man named François is a professor in Paris. He is a scholar of Joris-Karl Huysmans, an obscure 19th-century author who, in his later years, converted to Catholicism in an epiphany. François is the hero, or rather anti-hero, of French novelist Michel Houellebecq’s Submission. François is listless—even his attitude toward sex is uninspired, as if it’s an activity like any other, perhaps like playing tennis on a Sunday, but probably with less excitement. There is too much freedom and too many choices, and sometimes he’d rather just die.

The world around him, though, is changing. It is 2022. After a charismatic Islamist wins the second round of the French presidential elections against the right-wing Marine Le Pen (after gaining the support of the Socialists), a Muslim professor, himself a convert, attempts to persuade François to make the declaration of faith. “It’s submission,” the professor tells him. “The shocking and simple idea, which had never been so forcefully expressed, that the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission.”